He was enduring bitter days. His love for Sheila would not expire. She treated him with the greatest formality. She paid him the deference belonging to a leading man. She was more gracious and more zealous for his success than most stars are. But he read in her eyes no glimmer of the old look.
He hoped that this was simply because she was too anxious and too busy to consider him, and that once the play was prosperously launched she would have time to love him.
This comfort sustained him through the loss of the two embraces. He could not have imagined that Sheila had cut them out to please Winfield, of whose presence in her environs he never dreamed.
At dinner that evening Sheila told Bret how she had brought about the excision of the two embraces. He was as proud as Lucifer and she rejoiced in having contrived his happiness. This was her chief ambition now. She was thinking more of him and his peace than of her own success or of that disturbance of the public peace which makes actors, story-tellers, acrobats, and singers and other entertainers interesting.
CHAPTER XXXIII
Sheila was passing through the meanest phase of play production when the first enthusiasms are gone and the nagging mechanics of position, intonation, and speed are wearing away the nerves: when those wrenches and inconsistencies of plot and character that are inevitably present in so artificial a structure as a play begin to stick out like broken bones; when scenery and property and costumes are turning up late and wrong; and when the first audience begins to loom nearer and nearer as a tidal wave toward which a ship is hurried all unready and aquiver to its safety or to disaster.
At such a time Sheila found the presence of Winfield a cool shelter in Sahara sands. He was an outsider; he was real; he loved her; he didn’t want her to be an actress; he didn’t want her to work; he wanted her to rest in his arms. His very angers and misunderstandings all sprang from his love of herself.
Yet only a few days and she must leave him. The most hateful part of the play was still to come—the process of “trying it on the dog”—on a series of “dog-towns,” where the play would be produced before small and timid audiences afraid to commit themselves either to amusement or emotion before the piece had a metropolitan verdict passed upon it.
It was a commonplace that the test was uncertain, yet what other test was possible? There was too much danger in throwing the piece on “cold” before the New York death-watch of the first night. That would be to hazard a great investment on the toss of a coin.
Sheila was cowering before the terrors that faced her. The difficulties came rushing at her one after another. She was only a young girl, after all, and she had swum out too far. Winfield was her sole rescuer from the world. The others kept driving her farther and farther out to sea. He would bring her to land.